Abstract
The traditional literalism account of meaning has been challenged by several theories that stress the importance of context and of contextual information in communication, especially for mechanisms of meaning determination and reference fixing. However, the role of lexical meaning in such contextualist accounts often remains only vaguely defined. In this paper, we defend an account of communication that keeps the advantages of contextualist theories, while a new element is introduced that we claim could help to solve some of the remaining issues. By differentiating Immediate and General Common Ground in communication, we draw a distinction between mechanisms related to the situation at hand and those concerned with world and language knowledge. We further argue that such a distinction can help to understand cases of loose use and metaphors of which we provide some examples. Finally, we claim that this distinction has grammatical reality, as it is shown by the examples from Lakhota (North America), Umpithamu (Australia), Kuuk Thaayorre (Australia) and Mongsen Ao (India) discussed in the paper.
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Notes
- 1.
Note that the distinction is different from the one between narrow context and wide context drawn by Perry (1997). As a matter of fact, he deals with reference fixing only, being concerned with solving the problem of indexicals. Our distinction, on the other hand, tries to capture the more general sentence interpretation problem, of which reference fixing is only a part. We thank Carlo Penco (personal communication) for pointing out the possible confusion.
- 2.
“Reference” is used in the wide sense if it includes the determination of meaning of adjectives and verbs, as in “loose use” and related phenomena.
- 3.
The problem would be—in a nutshell—that I would have to interpret my own thoughts in the light of the situation I am in. Since my realization of the situation I am in is part of my “thinking” and of what I am supposed to explain in the first place, the circle arises. Moreover, Wittgenstein’s argument against private languages would apply (Wittgenstein 2010).
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Berio, L., Latrouite, A., Van Valin, R., Vosgerau, G. (2017). Immediate and General Common Ground. In: Brézillon, P., Turner, R., Penco, C. (eds) Modeling and Using Context. CONTEXT 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10257. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57837-8_51
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57837-8_51
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